1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to communications, and more particularly, to spectrum management of wireless communication networks.
2. Background of Invention
An increasingly large number of individuals use portable computing devices, such as laptop computers, personal data assistants (PDAs), smart phones and the like, to support mobile communications. The number of computing devices, and the number of networks that these devices connect to, has increased dramatically in recent years. For example, traditional cellular telephone use and mobility continue to grow as the number of cellular subscribers in the United States exceeded 200M for the first time in 2005, with revenues from roaming services (e.g., services used by a cell phone user in a visited network other than their home network) reaching nearly 4B USD. Similarly, an increasing number of wireless Internet access services have been appearing in airports, cafes and book stores with revenue projected from wireless local area network (“LAN”) services to exceed 15B USD in 2007.
A wireless network generally includes many wireless nodes and users trying to gain access to a network. The primary means for controlling access include network access servers (“NAS”) and authentication servers. A NAS provides access to the network. A primary authentication server, such as an authentication, authorization, accounting (AAA) server, provides centralized authentication services to a NAS for authenticating client devices before they are granted access to the network. In typical installations, the devices and users are connecting through the NAS to obtain access to a network (e.g., the Internet) via some form of wireless connection. The authentication server is typically a RADIUS (Remote Authentication Dial-In User Service) or Diameter server.
The significant growth in wireless communications and the limited radio spectrum available, requires that service providers more efficiently manage radio spectrum. Currently, radio access networks (“RAN”) used to allocate radio spectrum in wireless networks assign radio resources based on generic device considerations and a first-come, first-served basis. Further current state of the art methods for allocating spectrum are based only on class of application (e.g. voice, video, gaming) or device capability/type (basic, standard, high, etc.).
Conceptually spectrum allocation and RAN access can be viewed as being based on two major concepts: physical radio resource allocation at the radio cell and call admission and congestion control at a protocol level using service type and priority. Physical radio resource allocation typically depends on equal basic access rights to set up the required communication channels, physical location and proximity to the radio resources, cell capacity and size.
Call admission and congestion control (“CAC”) typically depend on a higher level protocol making admission decisions following basic radio resource allocation based on: cell status in terms of ability to provide basic access and service requested by a user in terms of real-time sensitivity. These approaches are limited in that they do not efficiently assign spectrum and do not ensure a particular level of end-to-end quality-of-service. Furthermore, they are limited in their ability to provide tiered service offerings and dynamically adjusting bandwidth allocations based on subscriber characteristics or service provider characteristics.
What is needed are systems and methods that allocate bandwidth to subscribers based on subscriber and application service provider characteristics in a subscriber-centric manner.